Biofuels Coming With a High Environmental Price? 541
DurandalTree writes "With the spectre of global warming on the horizon, biofuels have been touted as the solution to motor vehicles' greenhouse gas emissions. But with biodiesel use on the increase, it appears a distinctively environmentally unfriendly footprint is being left behind by some of its prime sources; affected food prices are surging out of reach of the poor and rainforests are being destroyed to create larger plantations."
Happened in the past with renewables (Score:5, Insightful)
This just in.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Are we really so myopic that the lure of "free fuel" has completely distracted us from the fact that nothing on this planet is being produced in such quantity that changing the market for that product radically will not affect the marketplace?
I guess the answer is, "yes."
Algae (Score:5, Insightful)
The best bet for biofuels is something that has less of an impact on the soil and the planet, such as algae based biofuels. Algae is grown in tanks, so the process requires less land, and any chemicals used in the process can be contained so it isn't spread over open land.
Fairly simple economics (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, switching to these kind of fuels will leave less of an environmental impact, but it will hurt poor people the most who consume corn frequently and will certainly lead to an increase in price in corn-produced food. [wsj.com] (Think Corn Syrup in soda) This is why we can't radically switch to biofuels like some people are calling for.
People don't really care (Score:5, Insightful)
The simple answer is to reduce energy usage, but people don't want to.
Stop travelling, have new stuff, heat/cool their houses, import food etc.
Myself I fully intend to visit a few more far off locations, I want a new couch and bigger TV, I want my house warm in the winter and cool in the summer and I want a broad selection of fresh fruits and vegetables year round.
That's gonna use a lot of energy, even if I gave up my car to walk to a market. People don't want to change, and they won't yet.
The latest trend I saw is directly blaming the "rich", which pretty much includes most of us with computers and the time to argue on slashdot. I don't see us making huge changes.
Duh. (Score:5, Insightful)
Energy demand = Growing rapidly without forseeable upper bound
If you switch from fossil fuels to biofuels, all you do is change the problem set, from pollution and peak oil to deforestation and starvation. There is one solution and one solution only: energy efficiency and conservation. I suppose you could say there is a second, getting energy from outside the system (i.e. space) but that still leaves the problem of getting the energy back out of the system (i.e. pushing it cleanly and transparently back into space once used) so that we don't simply heat/pollute the globe beyond control.
Re:This just in.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Happened in the past with renewables (Score:5, Insightful)
Corn is massively subsidised (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yes but... (Score:2, Insightful)
Biofuels are simply not environmentally friendly! (Score:4, Insightful)
Biofuels are simply not environmentally friendly in any way, shape or form. They are seen by some as a temporary solution to dwindling oil stocks. Not as the environmental saviour some idiots have imagined them to be.
Re:Happened in the past with renewables (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the OP means that those who don't learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
To me, the problem here is that we need to let free market evolution select the fuel sources of the future. The current situation in the US is various government funded "intelligent design" ideas each of which will eventually fail. But as long as the government $$s flow, the failures will be masked.
I'm all for new or different technology, but these things have to grow from the ground up, working out the bugs as they grow.
Re:Happened in the past with renewables (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Happened in the past with renewables (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you know how low-power, unreliable, dirty, dangerous, and expensive those things are? I own one.
Re:Happened in the past with renewables (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Happened in the past with renewables (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:People don't really care (Score:5, Insightful)
No one gets that getting molecules to perform work for us is what makes us rich.
I can't wait til environmentalists find out how many "poor" people will starve once they mandate "organic" farming.
The cost of almost everything in a market-based economy is purely based in the energy consumption of its constituent parts.
Hippies would sure be surprised to find out how long shelter took to build before the industrial revolution. That is why everyone lived in cramped quarters.
Economics is fairly simple (Score:4, Insightful)
The best example of where such a model falls down was the Australian wool industry. Wool was selling at a low price. Leading economists said the answer was simple - kill lots of sheep to make wool scarce. It didn't work, they forgot that cotton exists. I wish I was making this up but this piece of utter stupidity that ruined many farmers really did happen.
Re:Corn is massively subsidised (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
BioFuel isn't a renewable (Score:5, Insightful)
Corn is produced through an incredible usage of fossil fuels. From the fertilizers, through the mechanized Ag cycle. It's just awful! A petro-carbon boondoggle, for Monsanto and the usual Cheney back-room.
Then there's the "let's burn food!" aspect.
Re:Corn is massively subsidised (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Happened in the past with renewables (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Well, we have to try our best? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Happened in the past with renewables (Score:5, Insightful)
I ran the calculations a couple years ago and based on an average solar insolation rate of 5kwHr/day/m^2 for the the bands where the majority of the arable landmass is, and the 1.3 × 10^13 m^2 of arable land we get 6.5x10^13*365 or 2.37x10^16kwHr/year or 2.37x10^14MwHr per year. US demand was 3.3x10^12MwHr/year in 1999. The world has about 20x the population of the US, so worldwide demand if everyone lived like the US and population is steady would be 6.6x10^13, or about one fifth of the total insolation on arable land.
That means we need better than 20% NET efficiency from sunlight to usable energy to maintain the world at current US consumptions rates. That is just not possible and proves that our way of life is NOT sustainable in the long run without drastic reductions in energy use or population.
Re:Happened in the past with renewables (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Biofuels are simply not environmentally friendl (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but what?
If you want to be literal, then basically nothing we do is environmentally friendly. At least, nothing modern. In fact, the only environmentally friendly thing we could really do is to bury ourselves and become fertilizer.
But a biofuel can be mostly environmentally friendly. There are problems with issues like nitric oxides, which are produced by burning many fuels - gasoline, diesel, biodiesel, and vegetable oil alike. But then, burning wood releases many things that we would prefer not to breathe, and it is a natural occurrence.
One thing that you can say for biofuels is that they themselves are carbon-neutral. Other processes related to them may not be, of course. But if all of our energy was derived from biofuels, it would all be carbon-neutral.
Arguably the best fuel to use for these various reasons would be hydrogen. It is not an energy source, but then, neither is biofuel, which is the liquid result of processing plants made mostly with solar energy. Hydrogen burns most cleanly (the outputs are water and heat) but of course the energy has to come from somewhere, and it has a laundry list of problems, probably the most serious of which is hydrogen embrittlement which destroys everything dealing with hydrogen eventually.
An option I like a great deal for transmitting power is the use of compressed air. MDI's air car technology is quite environmentally friendly.
But put quite simply, the biofuels are our best hope for reducing our environmental impact in the short term, and one article that says that one flawed method of producing biofuels is causing problems is quite simply not evidence that the entire concept is flawed.
You make clever use of propaganda in your comment, but I notice that there is no actual content, no facts, no science. Please come back when you have some meat to place in your comment.
Re:Happened in the past with renewables (Score:5, Insightful)
Play politics or die by them (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:People don't really care (Score:1, Insightful)
However, I think it's interesting that in comparison to you, most people would label me as the environmentally irresponsible one with my gas burning SUV and my 5 mile commute. I'm sure you have a reason for needing to drive so far, but a long commute is rarely identified as a sign of disregard for our environment-- and it's just as bad.
Re:Happened in the past with renewables (Score:2, Insightful)
Missing the point altogether (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, I don't intend to go back to living in a world of horse flop in the streets, coal in my stove, pumping water every day from a well a half mile away. Nor should I. Nor should anyone else.
What is flabbergasting is that the same crowd that joneses for Star Trek all the time is so fast to posit that we need to live simply so that others may simply live. If there's anything Trek should have taught you is that life is not a zero sum game, mankind can design and reason its way out of situations it creates, and there are more than enough resources to go around and you just need to figure out what they are and how to use them.
We are truly stupid if we turn backwards right when we figure out how to do high efficiency fusion, store energy as extra mass, and other off the wall things we've cooked up in sci-fi but haven't gotten around to figuring out in the basic physics departments. We will be condeming all future generations to poverty of not only economy, but morality and ethics, because with poverty of nations go all those things we so hate in our pasts: war, slavery, conquest, exploitation, disease, starvation. We have more than enough of those things left now. We have been fighting damn hard to change ourselves for a long time. To rise from that horrid muck.
There's a difference between being more efficient and doing an about face in our march forward. And getting things done from building pyramids to cities needs energy of one kind or another. We can't simply stop using energy. We can make things use less and still use. We cannot stop using.
Damn us all now if we reflexively retreat from advancement now like idiot children. Damn us to hell.
Re:Happened in the past with renewables (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason Americans aren't building new urban areas isn't because of some great love of suburbia; it's because no one wants to live in a ghetto, and since most cities (especially those on the east coast) have turned into ghettos, it seems logical that any new densely-populated cities would probably turn into ghettos as well. (This may not actually be true, as there are cities on the west coast which buck this trend, but they tend to be very new cities, without generations of poor people who have grown up there to establish a ghetto. Nevertheless it is still the common belief that cities lead to ghettos.)
You're pessimistic by about 3 orders of magnitude (Score:5, Insightful)
The insolation in mid-Kansas is about 1550 kWh/m^2/yr. At 15% efficiency, this would produce about 230 kWh/m^2/yr of electricity. Divide 4.038e12 kWh/yr by 230 kWh/m^2/yr and you get 1.76e10 m^2, or 17,600 km^2. Total impervious area in the USA (roofs, pavement, etc.) is 112610 km^2 [ourwater.org], so we'd need to put PV on about 16% of what's already covered. This can be done when we re-roof.
True, covering the rest of our energy needs would take more, but that's no reason to curl up in a fetal position and suck your thumb.
Re:Happened in the past with renewables (Score:2, Insightful)
Any kind of energy supply is renewable and sustainable by the environment at a small scale, but isn't a durable solution to cope with the needs of 6 billions people. There is no energy supply allowing us to continue to develop like we do now, especially if more and more people can live like we do in developed countries. The only responsible course of action is to reduce the consumption, not to find alternative sources. Diversifying the sources will help, of course, but it won't be enough.
We have to be more conscious of the environment, at any scale, from the individuals avoiding to waste water and choosing low-voltage bulbs to urbanist limiting our need for cars and to governments applying stricter norms to building construction or applying the Kyoto protocol (hello USA
People thinking that the scientists will devise a perfect source of energy, infinite and without any waste or environmental impact, are just naive dreamers and it will be harsh when they'll wake up.
Biofuels were only meant as a transition (Score:2, Insightful)
In regards to fuel, there is a practical difference between an energy *source* and an energy *carrier*. (In general physics, it's all just energy transfer. But this is in practical terms, not theoretical.) There are only a handful of what we might consider energy *sources*: solar, nuclear, geothermal, wind, etc. Energy *carriers* would be: hydrogen, electricity, compressed air, etc. Biofuels are somewhere in between depending on how it's made. The difference is that with sources, we don't really expend very much energy to get a net gain of energy. Especially with solar (which is now cheaper and 40% efficient compared to past solar tech) we simply soak up the sun and use the energy. Biofuels are basically carriers of solar energy, just like oil. If we can make it with little effort, it's more of a source. If we consume a lot of oil, coal, etc. to make it, then it's more of a carrier. Hydrogen is made with electrolysis, which spends electrical energy (e.g. from the sun or another source), and you get the energy back using the fuel cell in your car that reverses the process to output eletricity, so hydrogen is also carrier (electricity could be seen as a carrier as well, since we are ultimately concerned with kinetic energy for motion).
To make a long story short, biofuel technology is meant for backwards compatibility until cars are designed to run on something else. The future will be energy sources that are practically free or will be very cheap in the long run once the tech becomes more widely used (e.g. solar, wind, nuclear, etc.).
Re:Happened in the past with renewables (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, the key word here is "expensive". That's another reason the suburbs are still the best option for most. If you want to live in the city center, you're either going to be in a dangerous ghetto, or in a very overpriced (and small) condo. The suburbs are the most economical choice by far. Your increased energy costs there are miniscule compared to the decreased land prices. Energy would have to become extremely expensive to change that equation.
Re:People don't really care (Score:3, Insightful)
"Reducing individual energy usage has a much shorter name.. poverty"
This is untrue. Energy efficiency, and sensible urban planning allow us to maintain (and even improve) our standard of living while reducing energy consumption. Please don't make straw-man arguements - _sensible_ environmentalists don't want people living in caves, or eating bacterial cultures to save energy.
However, we _do_ need to reassess some aspects of our society.
Suburbia tends to have the following characteristics:
- people can't walk/cycle around,
- they don't even know their neighbours' neighbours,
- laziness and inactivity are encouraged
and I think this is mostly the result of too much automobile use. I'm not saying that we should all get rid of cars - I'm saying that if we were less dependent on them that, in addition to the myriad environmental benefits, we'd also have huge _social_ benefits.
There's nothing Luddite-ish about this - this is about making a decision about the sort of society and environment in which we want to live, and taking steps to bring it into reality.
Re:Efficiency & infrastructure. (Score:3, Insightful)
Nah, anybody who said burning hydrogen has to leave the room. Anyone who said fusing hydrogen just gets to be called foolishly optimistic.
Still Missing the Point (Score:5, Insightful)
If we actually stopped and thought about what we were doing a small fraction of the time and budgeted what we had, we might have a chance of getting to that future you talk about. Otherwise, all that will happen is that new technology will beget *more waste*. How far has the space program gotten in the last half century? People flush the economy and ecology down the toilet and complain about research being a waste of money, so landfills fill up and space exploration languishes.
Re:Happened in the past with renewables (Score:2, Insightful)
If there were studies showing GMO food as anything other than a way to grow more, better food on the same land, I'd be the first in line, but there isn't. It's just a bunch of luddites wasting everyone's time while there are actual food health and safety issues to worry about being ignored. For example, food industries are constantly lobbying for more self-inspection and self-regulation, which has lead to cases where food of terrible quality makes it onto the market. In one case, it was beef for a school lunch program, and a bunch of kids got really sick. I don't recall if any died. Rather than picketing something that's hurting people and making kids sick TODAY, anti-GMO folks are fighting some boogeyman.
Re:Happened in the past with renewables (Score:5, Insightful)
I pity anyone trapped in such a place. It's not how a human should live.
Re:Happened in the past with renewables (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Happened in the past with renewables (Score:4, Insightful)
There are solutions. It just takes a little effort.
Not everyone wastes like the US (Score:4, Insightful)
Very few people are as wasteful as the US. This extends through energy use/waste and food use/waste. The whole system is propped up by agricultural subsidies which keep the system inefficient and unsustainable.
The typical US diet uses a hell of a lot more arable land than the average diet. The resulting land use is a major land destructor and uses a lot more water, oil land input than it should. One of the biggest problems is high meat consumption.
If people ate the grain fed to beef, instead of the beef, they'd only need to consume one tenth of the grain (ie grain to beef is only approx 10% efficient).
Each pound of beef requires about 3-4 pounds of oil.
Thus, switching to significantly reduced meat intake would use vastly less oil and free up a lot of land that could be put to other uses (eg. biofuels).
Of course, the farming and oil industries don't really want you to change the current high consumption and are happy for you to keep funding this insane system through subsidy handouts.
Re:Happened in the past with renewables (Score:2, Insightful)
I agree (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Happened in the past with renewables (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Missing the point altogether (Score:2, Insightful)
Not that much of the rest of the post isn't worth considering, but that statement surely needed comment. Clearly we're not even CLOSE to figuring out how to do all those things.
Re:GE food (Score:3, Insightful)
People who waste their time on trendy non-issues like this make me sick.
Re:Happened in the past with renewables (Score:3, Insightful)
Just because we didn't call them ghettos doesn't mean they didn't exist. America was the land of opportunity, yeah, but for many people, notably the irish, it was a place where they wouldn't starve.
Urban areas used to be a requirement back in the days when communication was difficult and expensive. These days when you can make a long distance phone call for a few cents a minute, instantaneously email specs/documents/blueprints, etc. instantly, and can video conference with reasonable quality at a cheap price, there is not much real need to be in the high rent areas of a city.
Well, if you're going to use Trek as an example... (Score:2, Insightful)
...you need to take into account all the planets they passed. Some of them had ruins of once great civilizations. Some of them were primitive, some of them had gone totally off the deep-end. Some of them just had small colonies. Some of them got destroyed when their stars went nova or something. Sometimes an entire planet would get destroyed by a war or a spacial anomoly.
The story was, by necessity, told from the PoV of a society that was functioning well enough to provide some continuity from episode to episode.
Why doesn't anyone have a look at human nature (Score:1, Insightful)
Every environment has a max number of ppl it can sustain. People, not animals, because animals don't USE the environment like people do.
The best of the best animals lead the herd, the fish with the most plentiful breeding habits survive, the most aggressive plants weed out the others... and mankind takes all the sick, invalid, and infirmed with it to "ensure equality for all"
I never saw a weak willed horse eat, in my 20 years of horse breeding. The one who was bullied out of food, died off first in the heard.
Nature's other creatures, feasted off the dead. And other creatures off them. and others.
Our dead are encased in steel tombs to not even enrich the grounds that might have given them food!
Re:Yes but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Ethanol fuel production is not the ONLY reason that slash and burn exists and is on the rise, but it greatly increases the rate at which it occurs.
I seriously doubt that ... and how could you demonstrate it?
If the demand for coffee were rising instead of the demand for biofuels would we be saying that drinking coffee greatly increases the rate at which slash and burn occurs? Ie. there is nothing inherent in biofuels that leads to this kind of deforestation. Nor would non-use of biofuels allievate deforestation. Instead this kind of deforestation is a function of population, poverty, inadequate government controls and outright corruption.
Biofuels can also be, and are, grown in countries with stringently enforced environmental protection laws, (relatively) wealthy farmers etc. etc.
In the article under discussion Malaysia was mentioned. Deforestation there occurs even in the absence of any demand for land on which to grow any kind of crops. It is fueled by rampant corruption, organised crime and the insatiable demand of Japan, Australia and other developed countries for paper.
A ban on using slash and burn farming for ethanol production would therefore just shift food crop growth to freshly slashed and burned areas.
You said it!
Re:Happened in the past with renewables (Score:1, Insightful)
criminals are solely responsible for crime
This attitude stops the root causes of crime from being properly addressed.
Sensationalism... (Score:4, Insightful)
Nobody is going to starve. It's just that we've all become so used-to subsidized corn, that we never expected having to deal with market forces. Now that we do, everything is changing. Farmers are looking for new cattle feed, companies like Coca-Cola are looking for other sugar alternatives than corn syrup, et al. The market is starting to take action on this change, and there's no reason to believe it won't work just fine.
That rain forest is being burned is a huge shame. However, biofuels certainly don't require the burning of rain forest, so they aren't really the cause. What's more, even in the current state of affairs, that kind of pollution is only a one-time issue, while that land will continue to produce biofuels for many, many years.
Claims of limited arable lands are nonsense as well. Water can and is being transported to arid regions for crops. Every farmer in the developed world fertilizes their own fields, and there is no shortage of compost available. Once again, it will require some changes, and initially higher prices, but it really is the kind of thing the free market is perfectly good at handling, if you just give it a few years to work itself out.
People are touting cellulose ethanol, which is a good option, but it's going to have precisely the same drawbacks, just less pronounced... Food prices rising because cellulose is currently used in hog and cattle feed. Expansion of farming to meet the demands. Rising prices of crops, as existing farmland is stretched to produce enough fuel. Increase in use of petroleum fertilizers, as cheap cellulose is no longer available for compost. etc.
Things like algae for production of biofuels have plenty of potential, but it isn't just going to spring-up overnight. You really need to create a guaranteed demand for the product, before anyone is going to be willing to invest in such technologies. Indeed, the more expensive corn ethanol gets, the higher the potential profit in developing algae solutions.
Just saying "to hell with it, developing biofuels is too challenging" is just going to prolong our problems. Giving up on a good option, because it produces complications like higher corn prices in the (very) near-term is horribly myopic. We'll be reaping the benefits of widespread production of biofuels for at least the next century, and probably longer. Those in the poorer parts of the world, affected by the food prices, will also.
Re:Happened in the past with renewables (Score:5, Insightful)
Some of these policies will hurt people living out in the real countryside (especially the fuel tax one) but the benefits overall are strong. A way of easing the pain for people who have to be in the countryside (e.g. farmers) is tax rebates, but these would have to be carefully designed to prevent massive abuse. (It's proved a tricky balance to get right in other countries, FWIW, but I suspect it is still the fairest way.)
I should note that living in a small and largely self-contained municipality of a few thousand is a perfectly acceptable response to the above policies; that's how a great many Europeans actually live, even though we have a lot of big cities too. I'd also like to point out that the US isn't the only place agonizing over these problems; I can remember them being a regular topic of debate here (the UK) at least as far back as my memories of such topics go (late '70s).
Re:Happened in the past with renewables (Score:3, Insightful)
The Vanity of the Wealthy (Score:2, Insightful)
. . . will always win out over the needs of the poor.
And nothing is more vain than living a life of privilege and consumption while pretending to care about the poor.
Are you listening Al Gore?
Re:Happened in the past with renewables (Score:1, Insightful)
Lets get a few things straight here. City doesn't equal ghetto, and ghetto doesn't equal dystopia. People who think this way have never lived in a city neighborhood, much less a ghetto.
The ghetto as dystopia became part of the public consciousness after the public moved to the suburbs, so it can hardly be the cause of it. What really happened was a change in lifestyle brought on by material prosperity. Most people who grew up in the city have a fondness towards that life; despite moving to the suburbs because "they are better places to raise a family" (which is questionable), there's no question its a hell of a lot more fun to be a kid in the city than a kid in the suburbs. My kids have to be shuttled to play dates half mile or more away; when I grew up in the city the neighborhood was so crammed with kids I rarely played with kids who lived more than a hundred yards from me.
The problem is once you move into the suburbs, you can't fit into your old way of life anymore than most middle aged people can fit into the clothes they wore as teenagers. You have too much stuff, and you need a place to put it all. The way you pay for your stuff is in time. You work longer to get stuff, you spend time commuting to distant jobs; you spend time rooting through all your other stuff before you find the thing that you want. You might even hop in your car and drive half an hour to a big box store to buy something you know you already have, but you can't find.
The idea that cities are uniformly horrible places to live is just a rationalization for the sheer amount of time we devote to the accumulation of junk.
The reason that people "aren't building new urban areas" is that the idea of development meaning expanding into new geographic areas is contrary to the logic of cities. Cities are about achieving efficiency by concentrating people. Suburbs are about spreading out so there's a space for all your stuff. People who have adapted to the suburban lifestyle have to give up stuff to live an urban lifestyle. People adapted to a urban lifestyle have to give up time to live an suburban lifestyle.
That said, there is a New Urbanism [wikipedia.org] movement that has attempted, with limited success, in creating new urban areas that are not in any sense "ghettos". If you look at Seaside, you would not call it a ghetto, nor would you call it a city. What it is is a suburb that is unusually dense relative to other communities with similar median incomes. It's what you get when you squeeze wealthy people into the same population densities as homeowners on the lower end of the income spectrum. What you end up with is for a small tradeoff in space to accumulate junk, you achieve a high density of money which attracts services. You don't have to get in your car to go to a restaurant or buy a hammer. You get some time back from the time/space tradeoff.
I grew up in the city, and I am raising my family in an affluent middle class suburb. If there were decent schools in the city, I'd move back in a heartbeat, although I'd have to have an almighty garage sale first. My affluent suburb has a couple of drug ODs a year in its high school. At least once a year there's an out of control party where the parents are away, which often turn into big drunken fights. During the last one a kid ended up with brain damage when he was clocked over the head. If you drew a circle around my childhood home a mile in diameter, something horrible was sure to happen every year. But if you drew a boundary containing the same number of people but living in the kind of middle class suburb I do, I don't think the rate of horrible things is that much greater.
Re:Happened in the past with renewables (Score:1, Insightful)
Ahh, the first law of liberalism. Emphasis mine.
Re:Happened in the past with renewables (Score:3, Insightful)
I fail to see how these anecdotes compare in any way to inner-city neighborhoods where carjacking, muggings, murder, and rape are the norm. Crime happens everywhere (especially around teenagers), but it's much worse and more frequent in some places than in others.
Re:Happened in the past with renewables (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, it is the attitude of people like you which has been causing a lot of the problems in the first place. Big city official in the U.S. LOVE to force people to do stuff - They have been using all sorts of authoritarian methods to try to force people to live according to whatever European design is popular. They love to tax, love to regulate, love to dictate. They can't get enough of it.
The trouble is that people (at least Americans), don't want to be told how to live their lives. It is the idea that people should be forced (as you suggested) to live a certain way that people are running away from when they go to the suburbs! A tax on gas won't do anything, because people will gladly pay a lot more for gas, in order to pay less property tax, in order to paint their house the color they want, in order to eat the kinds of foods they want without the government banning it, in order to be able to have a fenced in backyard without the fear of some urban planner telling them "Fences create barriers! We are going to force everyone to remove their fences to create a greater sense community!" because that is the fashionable thing to do at the time.
Perhaps Europeans are more comfortable being micromanaged by the state because their long history of monarchy and imperialism created a culture where people are more conformist and obedient - it wasn't a big step from your feudal lord issuing commands, to your local planning board issuing commands. But in the U.S., where the culture evolved around independent, self-sufficient, middle class rural farmers - Well in the 1960s in the U.S. when the role of city planners was changed from worrying about zoning, sanitation, and safety, to worrying about lifestyle, culture, and social justice, and the city planners took a much more European social engineering approach, American rebelled and moved to the suburbs.
Most successful U.S. cities, are cities where the government has decided to focus on issues like waste disposal, sanitation, public safety, etc., and not about banning trans-fats and goose-livers, building a "cultural identity", or whatever social issue is fashionable to dictate about. Americans traditionally want a government that stays out of their private lives, and that is why the suburbs are so attractive.